30 April 2012

In my first two posts about Microsoft's lobbying against true open
standards, I concentrated on a document sent to the Cabinet Office in
May 2011. Here, I'd like to look at another, sent in October 2011
(available in both html and pdf formats.)

Even though most of the focus around here has been on the UK government's Open Standards consultation (I do hope you've managed to reply by now - time is running out), the ACTA monster is still slouching towards Bethlehem. Things have gone better than I expected, with the ACTA rapporteur
recommending against ratification, the socialists confirming they will
vote against it, and rumours that the liberals will also vote against
it. But it's important to emphasise that it's not dead yet.

Governments around the world are seeking to monitor more and more of
their citizens' online activities -- and it's not just the most
obviously repressive regimes doing this. In the US, there is CISPA, while the UK is drawing up the Communications Capability Development Programme.
Thomas Steen alerts us to a further escalation of this desire to spy
on the public, in Norway. The secret service there (known by the
acronym PST) want details about comments posted on all Web sites
retained (via Google Translate):

The dramatic announcement that the EU's rapporteur on ACTA, David
Martin, would be recommending that the European Parliament should reject
the treaty was made at the end of a morning conference on the subject
organized by Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament. One
of those speaking in favor of ACTA at that meeting was Helienne
Lindvall, a professional songwriter and musician, who has now blogged about it:

As you may have noticed, open standards are a hot topic currently. One person who deals with them all the time in a variety of ways is Charles-H. Schulz.

That's because he's one of the leaders of The Document Foundation, home to the LibreOffice fork of the ODF-based OpenOffice.org, and he's also on the board of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). The following is an interview exploring his views about standards - open and not so open.

Back in 2009, Techdirt wrote
about an interesting challenge to a then-new law against counterfeits
in Kenya, on the grounds that it might be used to stop perfectly legal
generic variants of drugs being imported into the country. That
matters, because around 90% of drugs used in Kenya are generics, which
means that blocking them would have serious implications for healthcare
in that country.

One of open source's great strengths is that it is not a company.
This means that traditional methods of nullifying its threat – such as
buying it or causing it to go bankrupt – simply don't work. This is one
reason why traditional software companies have had such a hard time
getting their heads around free software and coming up with a sensible
response.

Open Access continues to gain momentum,
as more and more researchers seek to make their work freely available
online. One way of doing that is by modifying the contract that
academic publishers routinely send to potential authors, inserting a
clause that allows digital copies to be distributed.

In may last column, I wrote about Microsoft's efforts last year to derail any possible adoption of ODF.
That's very telling, because in a way it's quite separate from the
issue of open standards, and it shows that one of Microsoft's chief
fears is losing the extremely lucrative office suite business. But just
how lucrative is it? An email from Microsoft that is apparently
circulating around the Treasury department sheds some interesting light
on this. Here's what it says:

18 April 2012

In yesterday's post
about Microsoft's lobbying of the Cabinet Office against truly open
standards based on RF licensing, I spent some time examining the first
part of a letter sent by the company on 20 May last year. The second
part concentrates on the issue of open standards for document exchange.
This touches on one of the most brutal episodes in recent computing
history - the submission of Microsoft's OOXML file format to ISO for approval.

As Techdirt reported
a couple of years ago, a hard-fought campaign in New Zealand to prevent
software patents being granted there seemed to have paid off, with a Patents Bill explicitly excluding them that came with the following commentary:

In my last post, I wrote
about my Freedom of Information request to find out how Microsoft had
been lobbying against true open standards that mandated RF licensing.
In fact, I made another at the same time, asking a similar question
about the Business Software Alliance's contacts with the Cabinet Office.
There turned out to be only two meetings, and one email, so clearly
the BSA played less of a role than Microsoft in this area.

Last week, the EU Rapporteur on ACTA, David Martin, announced he would recommend that the European Parliament reject the treaty. He has now made good on that promise in his report, available in draft form (pdf):

Light Blue Touchpaper is a blog written by researchers in the
Security Group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory (don't
miss the explanation
of the blog's rather witty name). It's normally full of deep stuff
about computer security and vulnerabilities, and is well worth reading
for that reason.

Regular readers may recall that I was not a little taken aback by an astonishing U-turn performed by the Cabinet Office on the matter of open standards. As I pointed out in a follow-up article, this seemed to bear the hallmarks of a Microsoft intervention, but I didn't have any proof of that.

Last week we saw the Socialists and Democrats, the second-largest bloc in the European Parliament, turn against
ACTA. Combined with the stated position of the Green party there, that
means ACTA is closer to being thrown out when the vote for ratification
takes place in Brussels this summer.

As a way of fighting unauthorized sharing of digital files, DRM is
particularly stupid. It not only doesn't work -- DRM is always broken,
and DRM-less versions quickly produced -- it also makes the official
versions less valuable than the pirated ones, since they are less
convenient to use in multiple ways. As a result, DRM actually makes
piracy more attractive, which is probably why most of the music industry
eventually decided to drop it.

Something that's proving popular with politicians running out of
ideas for tackling unauthorized sharing of copyright materials online is
to make ISPs and Web sites responsible for the actions of their users
-- even though nobody would think of doing the same for telephone
companies. SOPA was one of the best-known examples of this approach,
and now it looks like Russia wants to join the club:

When I first started this series of ACTA
Updates back in February, I didn't hold out much hope that we would be
able to stop it simply grinding through the European approval process.
But over the last two months I've detailed some amazing events that have
had a huge impact on ACTA's chances of being ratified. And yesterday, those amazing events culminated in the following statement from the European Parliament's rapporteur for ACTA:

11 April 2012

The Boycott Elsevier
movement discussed here on Techdirt several times was born of a
frustration at the high prices of academic journals. But another area
arguably afflicted even more is that of textbooks for higher education:

Earlier this week I wrote
about the first company based on open source to reach a turnover of one
billion dollars. But of course, there are lots of multi-billion dollar
turnover companies that are based on open source - Google, Facebook,
Twitter etc. - it's just that they don't make money off it directly.

One of the central problems of ACTA has been its lack of transparency.
TPP has also been negotiated behind closed doors, but unlike ACTA has
permitted at least one small opportunity for public groups to engage
with the negotiators through the use of stakeholder forums,
where organizations and even individuals were permitted to give short
presentations about aspects of TPP. This has allowed points of view
other than those of industry lobbyists to be heard by negotiators.

I still remember well the day in October 1994 when I downloaded the
first beta of Netscape's browser. It was instantly obvious that this
was a step beyond anything we'd had until then, and that it was the dawn
of a new Internet era.

One of the favorite tropes of the anti-piracy crowd is that all this
unauthorized sharing is killing culture, pauperizing artists and
generally making the world go to hell in a handbasket. The only pieces
of evidence adduced in support of that position are the market reports
put together for the copyright industries that (a) say the sky is
falling and (b) base that analysis on the industries' own unsubstantiated claims.

Recently, there was some justified excitement that Red Hat had finally done it, and turned in annual sales of over $1 billion. A couple of years ago, I wrote
a post here on Computerworld UK wondering why there were no companies
based around open source that had managed to achieve such billion-dollar
turnovers, and suggested that the key reason was one put forward by Red
Hat's CEO, Jim Whitehurst:

06 April 2012

ACTA and TPP have much in common. That's no coincidence, since they
are both born of a common desire to move away from multilateral forums
like WIPO that are relatively open to scrutiny, to invitation-only
groups negotiating behind closed doors. That lack of transparency has
allowed all kinds of extreme measures to be proposed without any
countervailing arguments being heard about why they are neither fair nor
sensible.

We're so inured to hearing about unjustified claims of copyright infringement going unpunished that's it's good to come across a case where extensive damages were awarded for the harm caused.
It concerns a film that the Australian artist Richard Bell made in New
York, with the help of an assistant called Tanya Steele:

Last year Techdirt wrote
about Leah Day, who was trying to introduce a free model to quilting --
apparently a bold thing to do. Sadly, it seems that the ownership
mentality is nonetheless spreading in her field, as she reports in this
really excellent new blog post entitled "Copyright Terrorism":

The German series "Tatort"
("Crime Scene") has been running since 1970, and remains one of the
most popular programs on German television. Given this venerable
position, it's perhaps not completely surprising that its scriptwriters
-- 51 of them -- have written an open letter complaining about the
supposedly negative attitudes of some groups to copyright (German original). But what is noteworthy is the tone and content of the letter.

05 April 2012

As you may have noticed, the weather is
rather confused in the UK at the moment – one moment sweltering,
the next freezing. But I predict this summer is certainly going to
be hot, judging at least by what's going on in the world of digital
rights.

First of all, there's ACTA. In a
surprising but welcome decision,
the INTA committee recommended that ACTA be voted on in the European
Parliament, rather than referred to the European Court of Human
Justice, as the European Commission is doing:

After an eventful process where a minority of pro-ACTA
MEPs used procedural arguments to delay a decision, the EU
Parliament's "International Trade" committee
refused to refer ACTA to the EU Court of Justice. Such a referral
would have delayed for 18 months the final vote on ACTA.
Respecting the original timetable, the rapporteur David
Martin (S&D, UK) will now present
a draft report to his colleagues on April 25th, 2012. This draft
report will form the basis of the INTA committee's final
recommendation to the rest of the Parliament on whether to consent to
ACTA or to reject it.

The INTA committee, as well as the other committees working on
opinion reports, will also resume their works on this illegitimate
agreement.

That means we will need to contact our
MEPs before the vote to make sure they understand why ACTA is a bad
idea and should be rejected in the vote. Once that happens, the
judgment from the ECJ will be irrelevant: ACTA will be rejected by
Europe. And without Europe, ACTA as a whole is dead – hence the
importance of convincing MEPs.

Still on the European front, there is
the imminent revision of
the “Intellectual Property Rights” Directive (IPRED).
Although it's a little hard to know how the European Commission will
play this in the light of the turbulence around ACTA, there's no
reason to think that it will moderate its plans, which are pretty
bad. Here's La Quadrature du Net's take
on them:

the EU Commission
released a communication
on the digital single market covering most EU policies related to the
Digital Agenda1.
As this document suggests, the Commission is working on combating
illegal gambling websites, which could take the form of censorship
measures such as those implemented in France and other Member
States2.
Hypocritically, and probably to please the banking industry, the
Commission does not even consider attacking illegal businesses'
financial streams, which would be an effective way to tackle them.
Instead, the Commission paves the way to censorship measures at the
core of the network.In the area of Copyright, the EU Commission sticks to the
dangerous notion of “illegal content”, which doesn't mean
anything by itself, except that the network will be programmed for
enforcement. It is also pushing for extra-judicial “cooperation”
between Internet actors, payment providers and entertainment
industries, mirroring the very controversial Stop Online Piracy Act
(SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), currently discussed in the US
Congress.

Again, just because SOPA and PIPA are on hold does not mean that
there won't be further pushes to get them or something like them
through the US system. Indeed, just recently the US Copyright Czar
(what a ridiculous job title) has released her annual report on
copyright and its enforcement, and from that it's clear
the US will be pushing for more SOPA-like laws.

Meanwhile,
back in the EU, we have more bad
ideas: making "the production or sale of devices such
as computer programs designed for cyber-attacks, or which find a
computer password by which an information system can be accessed,
would constitute criminal offences."

That's
daft because, of course, many legitimate security tools can be used
to discover computer passwords, so this would instantly criminalise
those. The obvious solution would have been to allow an exemption
for research, but the people in the European Parliament don't seem to
understand what they are doing (just for a change).

Meanwhile,
back in Blighty, we have even more worrying stuff if this report
from James Firth is to be believed – and unfortunately, his sources
are generally pretty good – about the imminent Communications Bill
Green Paper:

I'm
told ISPs would become responsible for deciding what is and what
isn't copyright infringement on their networks and blocking
infringing content without intervention from a court.

Notice
and takedown would be expanded so that a whole website or domain
could be taken down on a mere allegation from rights holders that the
domain was used "substantially" for copyright
infringement.

And search engines would be asked to police
results, maintaining both a blacklist of whole domains which would
never appear in search results and a whitelist of preferred purveyors
of e-entertainment who would always appear at the top of the search
results.

Again,
this is seriously clueless stuff – breaking the Internet search
engines and allowing arbitrary site blocking at the drop of a hat.
It's really extraordinary how Western governments are happy to
introduce levels of censorship today that a decade or so ago would
have been unthinkable.

Finally,
just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, we have total,
police-state
surveillance being planned for the UK:

The
government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and
website visits of everyone in the UK under new legislation set to be
announced soon.
Internet firms will be required to give intelligence agency GCHQ
access to communications on demand, in real time.

The Home Office says the move is key to tackling crime and
terrorism, but civil liberties groups have criticised it.

….

A new law - which may be
announced in the forthcoming Queen's Speech in May - would not allow
GCHQ to access the content of emails, calls or messages without a
warrant.But it would enable intelligence officers to identify who an
individual or group is in contact with, how often and for how long.
They would also be able to see which websites someone had
visited.

Clearly,
this is extreme stuff: every communication that we make would be
recorded and accessible by the UK's intelligence services. Or
rather, the supposedly intelligent intelligence services, for this
kind of blanket surveillance is born of incompetence and laziness,
the last resort of people unable to do their job under democratic
conditions.

Instead,
they use the usual cover of "terrorism" to justify these
unprecedented measures, which they used before to introduce blanket
CCTVs around our cities. Weren't they supposed to solve the problem?
They didn't, and mass surveillance of communications won't either,
which will then lead to yet more erosion of civil liberties in this
countries. That's why we must stop this rot before it goes any
further.

The
good news is that the widespread outrage that has greeted this
extreme proposal seems to have caused the coalition to pause in its
plans, if only to regroup, with some mixed signals emerging about
whether there will be a consultation before bringing them back. We
need to be prepared to make cogent submissions to that if it happens,
and to fight for it if it doesn't.

So,
it's looking like it's going to be a long, very hot summer. Get
those knotted handkerchiefs ready...

01 April 2012

Copyright consultations seem to be like buses: you wait for years,
then several come at once. In the wake of the Hargreaves report, and
the follow-up UK government consultation, we have another one, albeit
rather different in emphasis.

As regular readers know, there is a struggle going on between the
free software community that needs open standards to be RF (strictly
speaking "restriction-free", but usually called "royalty-free") and
traditional companies based on proprietary software that are pushing for
FRAND - Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory - not least because it will allow licences like the GNU GPL to
be excluded. The argument is that RF means that any claimed patents
within a standard must be made available at zero cost - and that, the
proponents of FRAND insist, is unworkable, since companies will not be prepared to "sacrifice" their patents in this way.

Although I've not written about ACTA here for a few weeks, things are still bubbling away in Brussels. Here's a good summary of what's going on from La Quadrature du Net, probably the best source of information on ACTA:

One of the striking features of the ACTA debate is the deafening
silence from those who are in favor of it. Maybe that's down to the SOPA effect:
companies and organizations are frightened of being associated with
such an unpopular idea. Of course, it could just be that even its most
fervent supporters can't really come up with any plausible
justifications for it. That's certainly the impression you get reading a
rare attempt to raise the ACTA flag from the Institute for Policy
Innovation, entitled "Acting Out on ACTA."

While the global boycott of Elsevier by academics continues to gain momentum and signatures – at the time of writing, the number is approaching 9000 – there's an open access storm in a teacup brewing in the UK.

About Me

I have been a technology journalist and consultant for 30 years, covering
the Internet since March 1994, and the free software world since 1995.

One early feature I wrote was for Wired in 1997:
The Greatest OS that (N)ever Was.
My most recent books are Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, and Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionizing Science, Medicine and Business.